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="http://www.onlineuniversalwork.com"target="_blank">LATEST TREND INFRASTRUCTURE USA
America's infrastructure catastrophe
By: Dan Keegan
Date: Monday, 25. February 2008
Miami and Detroit are two of the United States' premier cities, but driving around either one is a lesson in the state of the nation's urban infrastructure and its social contradictions.
The street life and ambiance of Miami's South Beach is an urban delight, a tourist must-see. Areas like the opulent Coral Gables and the pleasant North Miami Beach are a treat to drive around. But wander off the beaten track and things can change rapidly, evolving within a few blocks into poverty and urban decay. The city's major arterial roadways tell the story: faded, almost unreadable,signs, sometimes obscured by foliage; badly marked lanes; poor surfaces; dangerous curbs.
At the north end of the nation, Detroit presents a similar story. A drive from the Detroit city core to the far suburban reaches of Farmington, along the arrow-straight Grand River Avenue, takes you from the magnificent buildings and stately streets of the downtown core to the opulence of Farmington Hills with its executive mansions. In between lies mile after mile of urban decay more reminiscent of bombed-out Baghdad than the richest nation in the world.
Fear factor
Last year, when an ancient steam pipe (installed in 1924) ruptured and caused a major explosion in downtown Manhattan, most people's first thought was that it was another 9/11-type terrorist attack. As the city's mayor, Michael Bloomberg, hastened to quell those fears the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) took the opportunity to pull public attention to a problem they had perceived for some time - infrastructure deteriorating on a massive scale throughout the country.
"Failing public infrastructure poses as much of a threat to human life as terrorism and should not be ignored," the ASCE declared in a blog posted on the influential Capitol Hill web site, TheHill.com. "Adequate and efficient infrastructure is vital to the safety and economic welfare of the nation. The exploding steam pipe in New York is just a single example of the crumbling public facilities all over the nation," the blog warned.
Elana Levin, communications manager at the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, had a more pointed comment: "Infrastructure is quite literally crumbling beneath our feet," Levin wrote in a blog on the DMI web site, and "it's not the terrorists, it's the tax cuts."
"You can't have modern society without infrastructure like emergency services, a working sewage system and a power grid. And if your only goal is to cut taxes, eventually you are left with asbestos-covered steam pipes from 1924 that explode and kill people - - and yes, damage business interests."
Money working together
Levin found all the Republican talk about tax cuts frustrating. "My money can do a lot more than pay a month's cellphone bill if my money is working in concert with other people's dollars," she pointed out.
Meanwhile, over at the U.S. Department Of Transportation's Federal Highway Administration, the folks at the top must have been feeling a certain degree of vindication to mollify their frustration. Transportation infrastructure problems have been accumulating for decades. A 1997 DOT report on crumbling infrastructure observed that a 34 percent increase in highway capacity was needed in the next 10 years just to stay even with the anticipated growth in vehicle-miles traveled (VMT).
This expansion would cost about $150 billion over the next decade for 50 cities -- if such capacity increases could ever be found to be economically and environmentally feasible. Currently, less than 60 percent of this VMT-offsetting capacity is being built
The FHWA is awash in acronyms for political and administrative initiatives that were supposed to address problems:
ISTEA, The Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act, was passed in 1991 with the intention of ushering in 'a new era' in planning, research, development and testing. It expired in 1997 and was followed by TEA-21, the Transportation equity Act for the 21 st Century. Then, in 2005, along came SAFETEA-LU, the Safe, Accountable, Flexible Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users. Even the acronym for that one is too cumbersome for normal conversation!
Last year a special issue of the FHWAs Public Roads Magazine (July/August 2007) summarized the range of options and initiatives lined up to address highway transportation challenges due to congestion and infrastructure decline.
Much of the high hopes for meeting roadway demands are focused on technological solutions: sensing devices to monitor traffic, delivery technologies to bring information to users, navigation devices to help avoid congestion, and, more optimistically, automated convoying of vehicles to save space.
As prominent in the list of proposed solutions is the matter of road tolls and road pricing which would charge drivers directly for road use according to where, when, and perhaps even how they drive. The technologies for these measures are already in existence and waiting for development and implementation.
Road pricing is a controversial issue, particularly in a nation used to "free" use of roads. Perhaps even more controversial is the matter of "public private partnerships" (PPPs). The 1991 ISTEA act set the stage for "unprecedented cooperation between the public and private sectors." This initiative was pushed along by another acronym TIFIA (The Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act of 1998 ) which addressed practical matters of working out details of private involvement in highway megaprojects.
In recent years there have been some remarkable developments in Public Private Partnerships across North America. Major commuter roadways such as the Indiana Toll Road and the Chicago Skyway have been privatized leased to private international consortiums for 75 years and 99 years respectively. Recently, Virginia's Pocahontas Parkway was leased to a private entity for 99 years.
It looks like these deals are the precursors of many similar ones as cash-strapped governments struggle to maintain and upgrade highways across the North American continent. The trend looks inevitable, but it may not always be a good deal for the road-using public.
Canada's province of Ontario, for example, developed a pioneering electronic tollroad in the early 1990s. It opened as highway 407 in 1997. The highway paralleled one of the busiest motorways in North America (second only to the Santa Monica freeway in California) and was a complicated megaproject which had its origins as far back as the 1950s, when land was first expropriated for it. In 1999, the provincial government provoked great controversy when it gave an international consortium (the same one that now operates the Indiana Toll Road and the Chicago Skyway) an unprecedented-at-the-time 99-year lease on the roadway for about $2 billion.
The government of the day was accused of hastily selling off the highway for an inadequate amount in order to balance its books prior to an election. The $2bn 1999 price looks a lot less impressive in 2008 as congestion increases the highway's business and tolls have been increased several times. The first increase of 12% came in September, 1999.
Apart from the dread of collapsing bridges and highway sink-holes, the consequences of roadway neglect are far-reaching and ominous. "Mobility is one of our country's greatest freedoms," said U.S. Secretary of Transportation Mary E. Peters a few years ago, "but congestion across all of our transportation modes continues to limit predictable, reliable movement of people and goods, and poses a serious threat to continued economic growth."
With that kind of impetus driving progress - along with an environment of impoverished governments - privatized roads and road pricing look to be the way of the future and set for rapid advance.
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somaie,
roadrunner,
i don't mind paying for road used as long as its fair and not too expensive. Its really difficult to build new roads now, so if highways are owned privatley we will probably get hit with higerh and higher tolls because there won't be reasonable alternative roads. Thats great for the shareholders but not good for the public.
Jonathan Foster,
Right on. There are so many roads that I fear driving on in the USA. And underneath is crumbling sewage lines and even electricity cables etc. Somethings gonna give, literally.
